Three days, now!

It's very close, now; in just three days time I'll be on my way to Heathrow.

I seem to have managed to be very organised indeed - which is good, don't get me wrong!  I was brought up by a chronic worrier and it did rub off, as it was bound to; I don't usually worry about travelling until the last minute, but this is a much longer trip than usual and I did set out quite early on to plan as much as I could well in advance.  The upshot of this is that I find I'm going to have to look for things to do, to fill in the time until Tuesday morning, so that I don't end up staring out of the window and brooding.

There is always the possibility of things happening that I can't control (strikes, bad weather, volcanoes and so on), but I've done my best to plan around everything I can.  I think that's as much as one can reasonably expect of oneself.  I still need to give myself a pedicure, water my house plants, and pack my bag.  That certainly won't take three days; so today I think I might go to the cinema.  A good silly movie, or even a bad silly movie, should take my mind off things.  

Thinking of movies, I took three dvds to the British Heart Foundation donation box on Wednesday.  Three disappointments.  One was "Les Mis", about which I was grumbling a few weeks ago.  One was "Star Trek Into Darkness", which was a muddle and lacked all the panache of the first "Star Trek" reboot.  And the third was "Midnight in Paris", which could have been terrific and was all the more disappointing because of that.

I have to admit I'm not a huge Woody Allen fan.  I was once; he was very funny about thirty-five years ago.  But his films haven't made me chuckle much since "The Purple Rose of Cairo".  I'd bought "Midnight in Paris" because a) it was reduced to three quid in a sale, b) it has a tremendous cast, and c) I was really intrigued by the premise.  It sounded magical and fantastical; and I do love the magical and fantastical.  I didn't really register who it was directed by, I just thought "Time travelling in Paris at the stroke of midnight?  Oooh!" and picked it up. 

Well, the cast is tremendous.  All the historic characters are stunningly well cast, and they all play their roles - many of them just tiny cameos - with an intensity and seriousness that the thin script doesn't really deserve.  Marion Cotillard is luminous and intelligent, as usual, and brings all her quietest subtlety to a part that seems to have been written as a completely empty-headed fantasy.  And the historic sections all look fantastic, too.  The sets!  The costumes!  The cars!  The locations!  Sheer eye-porn.  Especially the costumes, crikey yes. 

And the time-travelling premise is magical.  But the magic is barely noticed; you have to enter into it imaginatively for yourself, because it's hardly explored at all.  In fact nothing is really explored; there's no psychological depth at all, and no emotional depth, much less emotional truth.  The hero's one moment of realisation is cringemakingly clunky.

Then the awfulness of his present-day life is so heavily emphasised it becomes embarrsssing.  I've never been one for the comedy of embarrassment; and in this case it embarrassed me for the film-makers.  One can see pretty much right from the start that the hero and his fiancee are wildly unsuited to one another; so wildly unsuited that it beggars belief they would ever have reached the point of getting engaged in the first place.  The process of their break-up is both obvious and heavy-handed, and one feels not a jot of remorse for them.  One is left feeling they were barely directed at all; "Just be a dumb well-meaning guy, and you, dear, just be a shallow bitch; thank you!"  The hero's reaction to discovering he can time travel is to gape vacuously once or twice, and then just accept it; he barely even seems excited, much less confused or scared, or stirred in any way.  And all he does with this extraordinary opportunity is get drunk a few times and get one person to critique his half-finished novel. 

The whole film smacks of having been scarcely thought about at all, as though the process of writing and filming it had been conducted while deeply engaged with something else.  It managed somehow to be both self-indulgent and at the same time terribly thin.

It could have been so much more, because the idea is a clever one and could have had both heart and soul, if any heart or soul had been shown towards it; and the cast are really very good.  If only the script-writer and the director had been bothered to do more than trot through the motions. 

Yes, I know one can end up in deep trouble with time travel stories.  But if others have known that, and still gone ahead, and come up with stories that had depth and strength (e.g. "Looper"), then I'm sure a different treatment of this story could have achieved the same thing. 

Such a shame.  Well, hopefully it will make a couple of pounds for the BHF. 

Two weeks to go

In a fortnight's time I will be sitting on a plane, on my way to Athens.

I've planned my route and booked almost all my accommodation, and I've sorted out a lot of information on things like bus routes and ferry schedules.  I've treated myself to a better camera than the toy one I've been using for the last couple of years, and a new sketchbook.  I'm a bit nervous, now the time is getting close.  I'm also very excited.

I am at something of a crossroads in my life.  I’ve been made redundant, I’ve recently been diagnosed with a life-long and serious medical condition; things I'd been certain of have changed irrevocably.  Suddenly my life has been reshaped, and perforce also seems shorter and more prescribed (and indeed proscribed, too) than I ever imagined it would be.  On top of that, in December of this year I will turn fifty.   

I may never have another opportunity as good as this to set aside the demands of regular wage-earning, and the expected cautious behaviour of the middle-aged, and risk doing something that excites me and me alone.  And with my age and my altered health in mind, the idea of travelling alone, trying to fulfil a challenging project, becomes a kind of mid-life rite-of-passage.  

Can I still do something like this at all?  Am I going to be okay, setting off on this daft month of travelling as if I were still 23?

And then that question prompts a deeper one in me, of whether I'll be able to face the next stage in my life with a spirit of hope and adventure, or have to accept lowered hopes and narrowed horizons from now on. 

I want to find out again who I am and what makes my life feel worthwhile.  I want to prove to myself that I can still meet a challenge, instead of running away from it and hiding.

The chances are that I am now getting on for 2/3 of the way through my time on this earth.  I do not want my remaining years to be lived with the shutters drawn. 

Since the Greek government has now quit and called elections for mid-September, I'm going to be travelling during the last stage of the election campaign, and into its aftermath.  The BBC are suggesting that polling day will be the 20th, when I'm expecting to be staying on Poros, one of the islands of the Saronic Gulf.  So that will be an interesting additional thing going on.

So, I’m going on a pilgrimage, at a time of flux in my life, to visit a country also in flux.  I first visited Greece 26 years ago, and so much has changed here in that time.  The country had just joined the EU when I first went there, and has now come close to leaving it again.  When I travelled across Greece in 1989, the drachma was still the currency, and the years of dictatorship weren't much more than a decade in the past.  And it was quite an old-school place in someways.  One could get on a local bus and still find someone in the next seat carrying a pair of live chickens tied together at the feet.  It was still quite common to see elderly people wearing elements of traditional regional costume as their daily wear.  I remember it as an extraordinary shift in atmosphere and pace, after the very deliberate and self-conscious style of Italy.

 

A lot has changed since then.  Now my beloved Hellas is again in a time of transition, struggling with enormous problems, facing frustration and loss.  It would be crass for me to pretend that I, as an outsider, have any useful insight to offer on the situation of a people struggling to survive and a country rendered desperately poor by a huge complex mess of problems.  All I can speak of is my own experience, as a philhellene, trying to come to terms with my own personal problems and looking around me at larger problems, and at lives affected more drastically, and with less hope of rescue or safety.  I hope so much for things to begin to straighten out for them.

Well, when I get there, I'll see what I find.  For now, I have the remainder of my planning to do, and there are just two weeks left to do it in.  Much of which is already committed to other things (seeing friends, visiting my Mum, doctor's appointments and so on).  So I really do need to get on now.

...if not quite to square one...

I've been writing on and off about this plan to go travelling in Greece this coming September, taking my lead from Pausanias and visiting places he writes about to draw or paint them as they are today.  I just made a list of the places I'd like to visit, that seem moderately reachable (& in some cases, that have been identified with reasonable certainty - not every ancient site is as confidently known as Mycenae, say). 

That is to say, a list of sites in Athens, Attica, Boiotia, Phokis, and Corinth and the Argolid.  I had already accepted I'd need to forget about the whole of Etolia-Akarnania and the whole of the rest of the Peloponnese - Achaia and Elis, Arkadia, Messinia and Lakonia - until another trip.  But I'd an idea I could cover the rest in one month.

It came to 54 sites.  Oh bugger.

Allowing one day per site, plus several travelling days to move between regions and between regional bases, that would mean around 60 days' worth of touring.  And that's without allowing myself so much as a single day to forget being intelligent and cultured, and just go and lie on a beach or sit under a pine tree by the sea and enjoy the view. 

I don't think I'm up for 60 days solid of history without a break.  It could start to feel like a chore instead of an adventure.  And on top of that, my travel insurance only covers me for a maximum of 31 days.
 
So I need to rethink my plans.  It's back to square one; or at least, back several squares.  This is why planning is so important!  I need to book my plane tickets fairly soon, and at least some of my accommodation.  So I need to have this planning stage sorted out.  Which means I do need a clear itinerary.

So, I must narrow my focus.  Do I start in Athens and then head for Corinth and the Argolid?  Or do I start in Athens and then head west through Boiotia and into Phokis?

I would dearly love to see Delphi again.  But the Argolid is so packed with things worth seeing; and I've only ever paid the most sketchy visit to Corinth, and I've never climbed the Acrocorinth, or been to Isthmia or Sikyon...  Yes, on balance I'm starting to think the logical way to limit myself is to take just that little corner.  A few days in Athens to start with, then cross the Isthmus and base myself in Argos or Nafplio for the remainder of the time.  Then back to Athens in early October for a last day or two, and home.

I can have a city break in Athens in November, maybe. Or at my birthday. 

I can do another region in the spring.

I don't want to skimp, that's the thing.  When I went to Greece for the first time, I skimped.  I knew there wasn't time to see everything, and I knew I'd never be happy just doing the main "circuit" and ticking those famous boxes; Mycenae, check, Epidaurus, check, Parthenon, check.  I tried to fit in more, in the areas I'd picked out; and I still ended up skimping and leaving out places that sounded interesting. 

The problem is, almost anywhere can be intersting, if you look at it the right way.  The world is so full of fascination, the moment you start to go beyond the obvious.  There's always so much more to see.

For example, I don't want to miss out Boiotia altogether this time.  Twenty-six years ago, I went straight through the whole of Boiotia and eastern Phokis on a bus (in the pouring rain!) to Delphi, and ended up staying there for over a week because there was so much to do and see.  I spent three days "doing" the site of Delphi itself, then I went to Amphissa, to Arahova, and to Itea twice (admittedly the second of those days was in order to spend a day at the beach) and I had an amazing day hiking up into the foothills of Mount Parnassos. And I wasn't stopping to draw, then; I was just seeing the sights and taking it all in.

I want to do things differently; properly.  If a job's worth doing, it'sworth doing well,as my late father liked to say.  If that means concentrating more carefully on a smaller area, well, okay, let's re-do the plan and do it that way.

Though maybe I'll tuck in a quick pilgrimage to Delphi, right at the end of the trip.  It was a magical place.